Editorial: Privacy rights in a digital age

In an interesting twist, the privacy rights of those who comment anonymously on this newspaper's website have been protected by a judge, while the private e-mails of Gen. David Petraeus went public — and cost him his job as CIA director.

You recall the Shelby County commissioners' legal fishing expedition of a few weeks ago. The commissioners tried to compel The Commercial Appeal to release the names and e-mail addresses of commenters at commercialappeal.com who posted critical remarks about the merger of Memphis and Shelby County school districts.

The commissioners believed this private information could show that certain politicians and suburban leaders in Greater Memphis were trying to influence the writing of new state laws that would allow the suburbs to form their own school districts and circumvent the merged district.

But U.S. District Judge Samuel "Hardy" Mays said no.

The judge ruled that the information was not likely to lead to any revelations about a plot to convince legislators to change state law and allow suburban cities to form their own school districts. And, he said, poking around in unpublished, private electronic files on a newspaper's website "was not an appropriate subject of discovery.''

In other words, don't try to violate people's privacy to make your case.

Mays' judgment was most welcome and right on the mark.

But any final legal verdict on the larger issue of when government agencies — and businesses, for that matter — can get access to private electronic information is far from being rendered.

Witness the private e-mails of former CIA director Petraeus. The FBI cracked into the general's personal e-mail and found evidence of his adulterous affair with biographer Paula Broadwell.

That search was deemed legal. And revelations from those e-mails cost Petraeus his job, his reputation and perhaps his marriage.

That's the other side of the debate over what constitutes a right of privacy in an electronic age. And the debate is just now heating up.